


Prisons of Our Own Design

by feralgayanddumbassaoyama



Series: Homemaker [1]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Order 66, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, but you cant provie it DIDNT happen ;), id tag this as canon divergent, wait
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28536795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralgayanddumbassaoyama/pseuds/feralgayanddumbassaoyama
Summary: Order 66 happens, and Barriss escapes.Or: How to escape from prison without actually escaping at all, and maybe start a family on the way.
Series: Homemaker [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090586
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	1. Chapter 1

Barriss doesn’t know how long she’s been imprisoned, when suddenly, she isn’t anymore.

The door to her cell slides open with a _whoosh_. Her Force-inhibitor cuffs snap off and fall to the floor.

 _It’s a trick_ , she thinks, or maybe says, she’s been alone so long that it’s hard to tell anymore, taking a step forward. _It has to be some kind of trick_ , she thinks, stepping out of her cell for the first time in — years, maybe? She doesn’t know anymore.

“Barriss Offee,” a voice says, and she whirls around, looking for the source, and feels like a fool when she realizes that it came from the prison’s internal communications system, an angry flush racing up her cheeks.

“You have been acquitted of all charges,” it continues, “by order of the Emperor, and declared a free citizen of the Galactic Empire.” A beep. “Please proceed to the end of the hall.”

“What the fuck is the Galactic Empire?” Barriss says. She knows she says it this time, because in the empty, endless corridor, the sound echoes, bouncing off the durasteel walls into infinity.

She walks, slowly, to the end of the hall, and she’s panting a little, and is angry with herself for doing so. She used to be able to run and leap for hours, but now just a little bit of _walking_ is enough to exhaust her. Frankly, it’s pathetic.

At the end of the hallway there is a package. It is unlabelled, but she knows it is for her.

She opens it. 

Inside is a set of dark, form-fitting clothes that cover almost every inch of Barriss’s skin and still leave her feeling naked and _seen_ , and… 

And a dual-bladed circle-staff lightsaber.

Taking it in her hand, she ignites it. The blades grow an angry red.

Sure beyond any doubt that she is being watched, Barriss forces a pleased smile to her face, cold and cruel and hungry, like she could eat up the whole galaxy and still be left wanting.

The door at the end of the hall whooshes open, and she strides out, head held high, back straight, tall and proud and a swagger in her steps.

Barriss Offee always had been a good actor.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: haha yeah these work better as seperate chapters but theyre really short so i'll upload them one after each other every day
> 
> also me: forgets about this until, like, 6 pm. sorry guys!

The second she leaves the prison complex, it hits her like a wave, so much death and pain and—

And she _needs to be somewhere_ , she _knows_ she does, so she _goes_.

There’s an empty speeder just sitting there, and she takes it, ignoring Coruscanti traffic laws and other drivers alike, not knowing where she’s going until suddenly the Jedi Temple fills her eyes.

The Temple is burning.

She bites down on her tongue, stopping the gasp, and some part of her thinks _they deserve it_ , and then she just stares, unblinking, and wonders why she’s there at all, and then she looks down and sees little bodies strewn about the plaza and it's like someone pumped her full of liquid nitrogen, colder than cold and still as ice.

_The children_ , she thinks, and takes off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im at tumblr at dykepixie :) leave thoughts here or there!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings for: violence, threats of violence made against children, death threats made against children, implied child death — all that good order 66 stuff! no child is actually shown to be physically harmed in any way
> 
> Roo-Roo Page, Wee Dun, and Zinn Toa are all canon characters shown in the clone wars, in that ep where ahsoka and anakin are rescuing force sensitive babies from the sith

Roo-Roo was scared. She was really, really scared.

She’d never felt this much hurt before, but it wasn’t her hurting and it wasn’t Wee or little Zinn, and the crechemaster had told them to  _ run _ but they hadn’t said  _ why _ and now there was  _ fire _ and she couldn’t feel all of her friends anymore, and it was  _ cold _ even though there was fire, and how did that work?

She wanted to ask one of the instructors, but none of them were  _ here _ right now, and there was a really loud noise, like popping but bad, and lots and lots and  _ lots _ of shouting.

Zinn, who was really just a baby and could hardly walk, started to cry. Wee tried to quiet him down, but none of them were big enough to rock him like the instructors did the  _ really _ little babies, or bounce him up and down, so it didn’t help.

Suddenly there was a banging on the door of the room they were in, and it flew open, and there were a bunch of clones there! Roo-Roo didn’t feel scared anymore, at least not until they pointed their blasters at her and Wee and Zinn.

“Help!” she said, but they didn’t stop. “Stop?” she tried, and they raised their guns, and then Wee started to cry too, which just made Zinn start crying  _ louder _ , and it was all so much  _ noise _ that Roo-Roo wanted to  _ scream _ , but she couldn’t do that because she was too scared.

Then, the window shattered, and Roo-Roo really  _ did _ scream, because sharp glass was  _ bad _ and could  _ hurt _ , but none of it got on her or Wee or Zinn, just landed in a neat circle around them.

“Halt,” someone said. Roo-Roo looked up, and it was a Mirilian woman, with green skin and brown eyes and tattoos like diamonds across her face, everything else covered in black clothes that were really tight, and was that comfortable?

“Yes, sir!” the clones shouted, dropping their guns and saluting the woman.

“These three are mine,” she said, and Roo-Roo was  _ even more _ scared, now, because she did not sound nice. She looked at the clones meanly. “Leave me,” she said.

“But-” one of the clones said, the one in the front with a sort of funny looking thing on his right — left? No, right — shoulder, like a crest but sideways.

“I said  _ leave me _ ,” the woman yelled, igniting her lightsaber, and it was red red red, and red was a bad color, wasn’t it? 

“Of course, First Sister. Good soldiers follow orders.” The clones left, and the woman turned to look at Roo-Roo and Wee and Zinn.

“Don’t  _ hurt  _ them,” Roo-Roo said, stepping in front of Wee and little Zin, spreading her arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hands u some babychilds. here. 
> 
> :)c im dykepixie on tumblr! please comment


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> implied/referenced death — nothing graphic

“Don’t  _ hurt _ them,” the little gungan girl who can’t be more than three says, standing in front of her rodian and nautolan companions protectively.

Barriss eyes the trio of them, trying to make it out like she’s considering the best way to kill them while also looking bored and disinterested. It’s hard. She feels almost nothing but rage, rage at the clones, the centre of whatever horribly  _ dark _ presence she can feel just oozing through the temple, at the Jedi for letting this happen…

But if she lets her rage control her, then she knows herself well enough to know that she’ll leave, and hunt those clones down and kill them, and who knows what could happen to these children in the meantime?

“Hm,” she says, tapping one fingernail to her chin in fake consideration. “Give the little one to me,” she says — orders.

“Are yousa gonna hurt him?” the girl asks, and Barriss forces a slow, dangerous-looking smile over her face.

“Not if you’re good,” she says, almost crooning. The rodian loosens their grip, and she floats the child into the air, and considers him.

He’s too old for swaddling, but too young to walk much. She settles him into her arms and it’s the work of a minor suggestion in the Force to send him to sleep.

“Cover your eyes,” she tells the two children left standing.

“Why.” The girl asks.

“Because I told you to,” she replies, raising one eyebrow imperiously. The girl keeps glaring at her, and she sighs.

“There’s a lot of dead people outside,” she tells them, and… neither of them have the physiology to pale like mirilians and humans do, but they do the species-equivalent, and the rodian starts crying even harder.

The gungan pushes her eyestalks inside her head, and the rodian covers his eyes with his hands. Barriss lifts her saber up, above her head, and sets it spinning, maneuvering herself out the window and onto her speeder, at which point she realized she had a problem.

It took two hands to steer, meaning she couldn’t hold the nautolan, and while it could fit two adult humanoids comfortably, there was no child-safe seating. 

“Fuck,” she whispers, and glances around herself for anything she could use to jerry-rig some sort of… sleigh, or carrier, or… 

She glances back inside the room in the creche-tower, and realizes it was one of the bedrooms suitable for humanoid habitation (which meant none of these three could be staying there), which meant bedsheets, which meant…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment ! im on tumblr as dykepixie


	5. Chapter 5

Roo-Roo did not like this. She was still scared, but she didn’t think that the grown-up would hurt her or Wee or Zinn, even if she  _ did _ have a red lightsaber, but now she was just.

Hanging there. In the air. From the bottom of a hovercart. In a — the grown-up had said it was a sling — made of bedsheets.

Gungans, as any Temple-raised crecheling could tell you, were am-phib-u-os, which meant that they could live on both the land and in the water, which was two out of three of the most common types of places for people to live!

The one place they couldn’t live was air, so Roo-Roo  _ did not like heights. _

She kept her eyes tightly shut even after the lady said she could open them, and didn’t open them until they were on solid ground.

Roo-Roo was so scared and tired it was making her arms shake and the world sway, like the grass underwater, but when the grown-up asked if they wanted to stop here or keep going, Roo-Roo said keep going because she wanted to get as far away from the Temple as possible, even if it was almost the only place she could remember, because she was still scared.

The grown-up ripped up the bedsheet to carry Zinn on her back, and then picked up first Wee, and then Roo-Roo, in one arm each, like they didn’t weigh anything at all!

“You’re really strong,” Wee said, and Roo-Roo glared at him, because she could just  _ tell _ that he’d forgotten to be scared.

“Yes,” the lady agreed, “I am.”

She didn’t sound mean anymore, like she had back at the temple, and all of a sudden, Roo-Roo wasn’t scared of her anymore either.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

The lady looked surprised, and then she looked around some more, until she looked at one of the glowing signs that were  _ everywhere _ , and wow, this was deeper into Coruscant than Roo-Roo thinks she’d  _ ever been _ , and wow, wasn’t that dangerous?

“Blue,” the lady said. 

“That’s not your real name,” Wee said. Roo-Roo could feel her surprise that he could tell.

“Well, I think that if I use my real name right now, then the same people that are trying to hurt you will find out, and be able to find us, and that wouldn’t be good,” explained Miss Blue, and Wee and Roo-Roo looked at each other and thought about it and agreed that that would be bad.

“Okay, Miss Blue,” Roo-Roo said, and she couldn’t remember anything after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> arent little kids soo cute :) i love them to bits. i couldnt think of a decent alias for barriss so imagine she just saw smth blue and was like yeah thats it
> 
> i’m posting this from my phone so the format might look fucked, if it is let me know and i’ll edit it from my computer when i can
> 
> comment below or yell at me at dykepixie on tumblr !
> 
> also fun fact apparently nautolans start out as tadpoles, NOT babies hatched from an egg, so extrapolating from that baby nautolans (post-tadpole for the first year) are kinda squishy and need to be in water 99%-100% of the time or they’ll die. this is not reflected here because i didn’t know that yet, but if it was i imagine that Zinn would be at the point where he can be introduced to air, but not for extended periods of time. i may or may not update/edit this to reflect that, but for now pretend that’s not canon lol.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> phew! thats it

Barriss sells the speeder nearly twelve-hundred levels down, knowing she’s being cheated out of a fair price, but it was a nice speeder, and even at the price she got for it she still has enough money for transport to the Outer Rim, maybe further if she takes one of the cheaper ones — but she can’t do that, can she? Not with two crechelings and a toddler. What was a calculated, but reasonable, risk for her alone would end up poorly for them.

So she buys spaces on a cargo-shuttle, only  _ mildly _ implying that she’s escaping a dangerous home life, or that the children are, or both — she keeps the details vague on purpose, and the captain gives her a somewhat pitying, somewhat understanding look and asks her if she has any useful skills, to which Barriss replies that she’s a nurse, which is barely even a lie, and the captain doesn’t check their idents, just tells Barriss that someone’s always at least a little bit hurt, on a big cargo ship like that, and their last medic had to leave for some family emergency. 

Barriss uses the scant time before departure to buy rations for the four of them, standard type-O for her and types-V, -P, and -C for the children. Gungans are predominantly vegetarian, while rodians were carnivorous. Unlike Togrutas, however, who  _ needed _ raw meat, Rodians could live off of type-C rations more or less indefinitely, rat meat just being a preference, not a necessity. Nautolans are pescitarian, unsurprisingly, which means she would have to monitor Zinn’s diet closely, because type-P rations could be… tricky, to say the least.

They’re off-planet before the children even wake up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Boy I Sure Hope Nothing Bad Ever Happens To Those Kids :)
> 
> im not honestly super happy with this chapter but it is what it is.
> 
> i made up all the biology dietary stuff. as you can probably guess, ration types o, c, v, and p just stand for omnivore, carnivore, vegetarian, and pescatarian, pescatarian here meaning "entirely/almost entirely fish based"
> 
> please comment :D im on tumblr as dykepixie

**Author's Note:**

> haii :) leave your thoughts in a comment or come yell at me at dykepixie dot tumblr dot com


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